"Catching" Colds and the Flu

It’s that time of year, when patients come into my office feeling sick, and start analyzing how it happened and who ‘gave it’ to them. There is more than a touch of resentment as they recount how this person transmitted their sickness to them. So, in the interest of maintaining good relationships with your friends and family (and for the sake of objectivity and science) I want to zero in on misconceptions around what is deemed ‘contagious’.

Humans (and all animals) have a very intimate and vital relationship with bacteria and other organisms in our personal environment. Without our microbiota – the bacteria, fungi, viruses and other microbes inhabiting our gastrointestinal tract as well as throughout our body – we would not be here. These microscopic organisms help us to digest foods, maintain a healthy gut, protect us from harmful organisms, eliminate cellular waste, aid in producing neurotransmitters, are part of our cellular communication, and much more. This beautiful relationship has only become more widely known in the past three to four decades – after more than a century of misconceptions and vilification of microbes. In the past few decades we have grown to realize that a sterile environment is one of the worst things for our health and our microbiota. Finally, science caught on to the fact that we need good quality ‘dirt’, organic foods and fermented foods to optimize our health.

Now, this awareness has all but disappeared amidst continuous admonitions in the past few years to keep your distance, mask, and use hand sanitizer. We know that hand sanitizer does nothing more than damage skin (a very important barrier!) and selects for antibiotic-resistant bacteria. This was well-established, years ago. However, do we really know that we can catch a cold or flu from the people around us? There is a big wrench in that belief system: in experiments, where scientists have exposed ‘healthy’ animals or people to a ‘diseased’ group that have cold or flu symptoms, the healthy group did not get sick.

This is what happened at the time of the Spanish flu – and was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (1919) – as a landmark study by a Dr Milton Rosenau. He conducted several experiments to determine influenza’s mode of spread. He had a group of healthy volunteers spend time with influenza patients – they shook hands, talked and the patients exhaled heavily into the faces of these volunteers: nothing happened. Next, Rosenau and his team collected samples from the mucous membranes of influenza patients, filtered out larger organisms (bacteria, for example) and injected the isolate into healthy subjects: again, no illness ensued. The team even withdrew blood from the influenza patients and injected this into the volunteers: again, nothing.

Of course, we could never conduct experiments such as these today – human experimentation (voluntary or not) is completely unethical. But, considering the above results from incubating healthy with ‘sick’ subjects, let’s consider alternative explanations for illness, such as the underlying health of the individual.

When your body is expressing a fever, runny nose, coughing, perspiration, and loose bowel movements – these are your body’s methods of removing ‘toxins’. The routes of elimination are via the bowels, lungs, skin and mucous excretions. Toxins can include cellular debris from oxidative damage – which will increase the further out we are from summer, as vitamin D stores decline. As well, this time of year, work is busier, stressors are bigger and take their toll on your body. We are also mostly confined indoors, breathing stale recycled air. And then there's diet: for most people, as life gets more intense, food quality and balance tends to drop precipitously. All of this dramatically increases your body’s toxin load, compromising how your cells and organs function. The only way for your body to maintain homeostasis is quite brilliant: develop those symptoms that we call a 'cold' or a 'flu', and you are now shedding those toxins.

I will close with the obvious: Please make sure you are taking optimal amounts of vitamin D as well as other necessary vitamins and antioxidants. And do not throw your diet and self-care out the window when life gets too stressful. This is when you need to focus on self-care – on diet and balance and pare back on anything that is interfering with your health care.

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